Change, Innovation and Strategy
Insights for Emerging Leaders
Jack Jordan
Questions to Run on
• What can you do you to encourage more
innovation?
• Directly
• Indirectly
• What does culture have to do with it and how do
you foster it?
• Transparency
• Shared vision
• Permission to act
Type of Organizations that
Succeed
• Resilient
• Nimble
• Evolving
• Innovative
• The challenge is what do you to to foster
those aspects?
How do you Speed Change?
• Know who you want to change
• Know where your client is at related to
change
• Listen to reasons for resistance
• Be patient and step thru the process
Prochaska’s Change Model
•
Pre-contemplation (Not Ready)- People are not intending to take action in
the foreseeable future, and are unaware the opportunity
•
Contemplation (Getting Ready)- People are beginning to recognize that an
opportunity exists, and start to look at the pros and cons of their
continued actions
•
Preparation (Ready)- People are intending to take action in the immediate
future, and may begin taking small steps toward change
•
Action – People are actively using new process or method
•
Maintenance – People have been able to sustain action tracking results and
developing new rationalization of situation
•
Termination – Individuals have developed a new world view related to the
topic
Evert Rodgers Diffusion of
Innovation
• Five Items Speed diffusion
• Relative advantage
• Compatibility
• Simplicity
• Trialability
• Observeability
Taylor Strategy to Situation
Taylor Strategy to Situation
How do you Improve
Innovation?
• Experiment
• Give Permission
• Expect Experimentation (Make it risky to not try new things)
• Cheerlead for Change (Praise and reward trying, Celebrate
failure)
• Broad Points of view
• Collaborate with others
• Look for people with unusual connections
• Read broadly
• Encourage Collaboration
Courage to
innovate
Model for Generating Innovative
Ideas
Behavioral
skills
Cognitive skill to
synthesize novel inputs
Questioning
Challenging the
status quo;
Taking risks
Observing
Associational
thinking
Networking
Innovative
business
idea
Experimenting
Adapted from Christensen, Clayton M.; Jeff Dyer; Hal Gregersen, The Innovator's DNA: Mastering
the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. Harvard Business Review Press, July, 2011.
The Lone Innovator
“What a person does on his own, without being
stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of others, is
even in the best of cases rather paltry and monotonous.”
—Albert Einstein
“Successful innovation is not a single breakthrough. It is
not a sprint. It is not an event for the solo runner.
Successful innovation is a team sport.”
—Quyen Nguyen
Observe Real People in Real-life
Situations
“Innovation is powered by a thorough understanding ,
through direct observation, of what people want and
need in their lives and what they like or dislike about
the way particular products are made, packaged,
marketed, sold, and supported.”
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO
Customer Research - Deming
Needs
Customer
research
Design &
Redesign
Customer
feedback
Inputs
Production processes
Distribution
Customers
Support
Adapted from Figure 6, p. 58
The New Economics, 2nd Ed.
Customer Research
“It’s not the customers’ job to be visionaries.
Customers may lack the vocabulary to explain
what’s wrong, or what’s missing.”
- Tom Kelley, IDEO
Customer Research
“Every company prides itself on giving customers what
they ask for, but the problem with listening to customers is
that when companies ask customers what they like,
customers are sure to answer by naming products and
services that already exist. This form of research is really
just being an order taker, not an innovator.”
̶ Thomas Lockwood, Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer
Experience, and Brand Value, Skyhorse Publishing, April 2013.
Customer Research
“We have found that observers are more successful at
figuring out jobs to be done and better ways to do them
when they… actively watch customers to see what
products they [use] to do what jobs, …”
̶ Christensen, Dyer, and Gregersen, The Innovator's DNA
IDEO’s Five Step
Methodology for Innovation
1. Understand the market, the client, the technology,
and perceived constraints.
2. Observe real people in real-life situations.
3. Visualize new-to-the-world concepts and the
customers who will use them.
4. Evaluate and refine prototypes
5. Implement the new concept
- Tom Kelley, The Art of Innovation
Experimenting
The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of
ideas.
- Linus Pauling
“I haven’t failed . . . I’ve just found 10,000 ways
that do not work.”
—Thomas Edison
Experimenting
“Experiments are key to innovation because they rarely
turn out as you expect, and you learn so much… I
encourage our employees to … experiment.
If you can increase the number of experiments you try
from a hundred to a thousand, you dramatically increase
the number of innovations you produce.”
̶ Jeff Bezos, Amazon
Thank you
• Special thank you to Dr. Gipsie Ranney for her
conversations on innovation and sharing content
from her InThinking Network lecture
“They will not let us”
• Organizational myths keep people from trying things
• Who is the “Boogie Man” in organizations
• Transforming care at the bedside was a program to
kill this myth.
Experimenting
Structured
Unstructured
• Focused
• Free Form
• Rigorous
• May lack rigor
• Documented
• Varied Documentation
• Limited
• Nimble
The Shewhart Cycle for Learning and Improvement
The P D S A Cycle
Act – Adopt the change,
or abandon it or run
through the cycle again.
Study the results
What did we learn?
What went wrong?
A
P
Plan a change or a test,
aimed at improvement
S
D
Do – Carry out the
change of the test
(preferably on a small scale).
Deming, The New Economics
Competition within
Organizations
“The idea that achievement is maximized when we go at one
another tooth and nail is engraved on our national psyche. But when
the road to success requires making others fail, innovation gets left
by the wayside.
Competition infects coworkers with a desire to win rather than to
solve problems and move projects forward. In the process,
employees inhibit the free flow of information so vital to
innovation.
Those who feel their work is being judged on conventional concepts
of success and failure, and who feel they're competing with
coworkers for the brass ring, will want to protect information rather
than share it. This is a textbook way to squelch innovation.”
Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes, “The Failure
Tolerant Leader,” Harvard Business Review, August
2002
Complicated vs. Complex
Complicated
Complex
• May have many steps and
components
• May have many steps and
components
• Many actors may need to
accomplish role in the work
• Actors need to accomplish
tasks with communication
and feedback loops
• Results are replicable
• Building a Building etc.
• Results are not replicable
• Raising a child
How are the two managed
differently?
• Complicated problems benefit from tight definition
• Complicated problems can be planned many steps in
advance
• Complex problems can be fundamentally changed
by over definition
• Complex problems require course corrections and
solutions to issues emerge from observation
Constancy of Purpose – Test
of a Leader
• Deming’s first Point
• “All human organizations will disappoint” – Nadia
Bolz-Webber
• You will have to make decisions that take you away
from your core values. The test of a leader is not
abandoning those values.
Strategy
Staying a Step Ahead
• Connect yourself with broad set of ideas
• Read many points of view
• Hire people different from yourself
• Listen to those resisting you
• Look for the subtle
• Lead and crime / test scores
• Single use zoning and sprawl
• Common is not always better
• Deming and batteries
Connections Matter
• “Disruptive innovators shine best at associating
when actively crossing all kinds of borders
(geographic, industry, company, profession,
discipline, and so on) …”
•
̶ Christensen, Clayton M., Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, The Innovator's DNA:
Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, Harvard Business Review Press,
July, 2012.
Connections Matter
“Many companies rigidly separate functions such as
research, design, marketing, and manufacturing,
creating walls between groups that have much to teach
one another.”
“Build bridges from one department to another, from
your company to your prospective customers, and
ultimately from the present to the future.”
̶ Tom Kelley, IDEO
Leverage Points for
Engagement and Innovation
• What connects people to a larger
purpose?
• How do they keep tapped in to
discovery?
• How are they connected?
• What are the implications?
Loss of Community
“Beneath the current economic crisis lies another crisis
of far greater proportions: the depreciation in
companies of community – people’s sense of
belonging to and caring for something larger than
themselves.”
Henry Mintzberg, “Rebuilding Companies as
Communities,” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug, 2009.
Delivery versus Discovery
“…large companies typically fail at disruptive
innovation because the top management team is
dominated by individuals who have been selected for
delivery skills, not discovery skills.
As a result, most executives at large organizations
don’t know how to ‘think different.’”
̶ Christensen, Clayton M., Jeff Dyer, and Hal Gregersen,
The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.
Harvard Business Review Press, July 2012.
Structural Holes
“… behavior, opinion, and information, broadly
conceived, are more homogeneous within than
between groups. People focus on activities inside
their own group, which creates holes in the
information flow between groups, or more simply,
structural holes.”
̶ Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas”
American Journal of Sociology, September, 2004
Networks in Organizations
- Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas”
American Journal of Sociology, September, 2004
Import - Export
“People with connections across structural holes [gaps in social
networks] have early access to diverse, often contradictory,
information and interpretations, which gives them a competitive
advantage in seeing and developing good ideas.
… People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find
themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with
creativity. This is not creativity born of genius; it is creativity as an
import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a
valuable insight in another.”
̶ Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas”
American Journal of Sociology, September, 2004
Networks in Organizations
What Education Does an
Emerging Leader Need?
• System of Profound Knowledge (Deming
~1990)
• Understanding Variation
• Psychology
• Appreciation for a System
• Theory of Knowledge
Discussion
• What did you hear that is actionable?
• What challenges do you have to change and
innovation?
• What can you do you have to do experience
more innovation?
• Directly
• Indirectly